Contemporary

Part of me is eternally 14 years old, so I spent the first few chapters snorting with laughter at David Wong’s over-the-top slacker humor parody of horror movies, buddy stories, and various aspects of American society. Our hero, David, is a not-especially-heroic everydude who works at a video story, and constantly gets roped into his irrepressible doofus friend John’s schemes. A series of bizarre events leads to John being infected by a strange substance called “soy sauce”, which opens a gateway to another reality and enables the duo to see, hear, and experience weird things they previously couldn’t.

Part of me is also an adult, so the hilarity wore off a little once I’d gotten used to the schtick, but the story was creative enough to keep me entertained. Rather than just cranking out a predictable riff on horror movies, Wong (not his real name) comes up with a pretty imaginative, creepy universe of his own, one that probably would have been fun in the hands of a more “serious” writer, too. There are twists and turns to the story, as the soy sauce (and the dark beings behind it) bend the laws of time and space, and David reveals himself to be a less than totally reliable narrator. The author, it seems, had a grand old time anticipating the reader’s anticipation and trying to stay ahead of it. Does John really die in the end? Oh, you’ll just have to find out.

I can see where the Hitchhiker's Guide comparisons are coming from, even though Wong’s sense of humor is a lot crasser than Douglas Adams. Like that classic, John Dies is essentially a fistful of spitballs flung at the wall, and many don’t stick, but it has the same spirit of inventiveness and rambunctious fun. And there are some trenchant social observations -- towards the end, the plot used videogames in a way that made my mind go "whoah".

I'm glad I listened to the audio version. Smart-stupid wit often works best when it harkens back to its ancient oral tradition and, in this case, Stephen Thorne's conspiratorial tone and impeccable delivery are a perfect fit for the material.

Brilliant. I very much enjoyed Steyngart's Absurdistan, which satirized the former Soviet Union, but his writing reaches a whole new level here. This is a book about the near future America seems to be headed for, a country that's become a bankrupt, corporate-controlled police state on the verge of collapse, while mainstream Americans lead lives of vapid indifference, aggressively obsessed with youth, beauty, media profiles, and their rankings on a facebook-like service that publicly rates citizens on everything from their credit score to their "f***ability" (this is not a book for the prudish). It's very pointed satire, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, but often depressing because it's just close enough to reality.

Steyngart does a marvelous job with his two main characters: there's Lennie, a shlumpy, trod-upon 39 year old who works as a salesman at a life extension company, has a set of hilariously-rendered Russian immigrant parents who spend their day watching "Fox Liberty Ultra", hangs out with self-righteous hipster friends, and clings to his antiquated hobby of collecting old books in a post-literate era. He falls obsessively in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who personifies much about Generation iPhone, with her short attention span, text message vocabulary, constant online shopping (for brands with names like "Juicy P***y"), and lifelong immersion in a culture of looks and casual sex, and who struggles with her own old-country parents (including a mom whose advice-filled, English-challenged emails are quite funny). Their relationship captures, in a rich way, so much about the America we're living in. Steyngart doesn't take the easy path of simply mocking his self-absorbed characters (flawed though they are), but gives them them earnest voices, making them people we empathize with as the artificial bubbles of their worlds burst. Perhaps, in part, because it could soon happen to us.

Funny, depressing, sweet, and frightening all at once.

I quite enjoyed this exquisitely crafted short novel, which reflects on the way we reshape our memories, creating a self-justifying narrative that might lead us away from the complete truth. On page, the protagonist, a retirement-aged man named Tony who's led an unremarkable, solidly upper-middle-class British life, recounts what sounds at first like idle reminiscences of his schoolboy and university days in the 1960s. We learn of a brilliant schoolmate and friend named Adrian, a former girlfriend named Veronica, and the falling out that drove them out of each other's lives and towards different fates.

However, an enigmatic letter in the present day brings the half-forgotten past back to life, forcing Tony to come to new terms with what happened and why. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that we're hearing more than just a casual recall of long-ago events, and that Tony might not be the reliable narrator he wants to believe he is. Or connected to events in the minds of others the way he wants to be.

Like Jonathan Franzen's last novel (and what I remember of Flannery O'Connor's short stories), this is the sort of literature that relies on discomfiting the reader, first testing our sympathies for the characters, then making them cross some ill-defined frontier of reasonable behavior where we ourselves would probably not go. The implicit question, naturally, is: how far would we go? And when would our self-deceptions become apparent to us? This kind of literary screw-turning doesn't work for every reader, of course, but given the book's short length, I think it's bearable.

Both the writing and plotting are marvelous, the story winding delicately around a hidden truth that's not fully revealed until the last page. Each unwinding puts previous information in the story in a new light, until even the seemingly throwaway exchanges between smarmy British prep students and pedantic schoolmasters raise questions about how a mind might plant its own evidence in the past while searching for clues about it. Or, as one character puts it, how “history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

All in all, a complex, self-enfolding work of fiction, showing that the acts of rearranging the future and rearranging the past are never disconnected, and even a path towards reconciliation and sincerity can hold its own subtle self-delusions. Like other brilliant examples of the craft, it feels satisfactorily ended but leaves me with questions that continue to swirl in my mind.